AMA: Amplitude Former VP of Product Marketing, John Hurley on Market Research

I like to create what I call an Opportunity Assessment. Here is the general table of content for the presentation:  - Problem Hypothesis - Target Market- Market Opportunity- Business Metrics / Revenue Strategy- Competitive Landscape- Our Differentiated Solution- Basic Solution Requirements- Go-to-Market Overview (Timing and Concept)If it's an existing market, include- Competitive Feature Comparison- SWOT Analysis for top competitor Looks like the formatting is a bit off, but attached you can fin ...Read More

Ensure verticalization aligns well with core competencies, market perception, ability to deliver and differentiation. If you do not clearly understand the definition of the target vertical, the trends in that vertical’s consumer or enterprise user market as well as the size of the opportunity, it will cause internal and ultimately market confusion that hinders speed and success. Assuming that you've determined this is an attractive vertical to pursue, here is a list to consider at the onset of p ...Read More

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to date. By setting a strategy upfront, defining the set of deliverables and the cadence at which they'll be updated, and creating rules of engagement and set venues / channels for to communicate with teams, you can create a scalable system. For larger orgs, you may have to create SLAs between your team a ...Read More

Here is the competitive intelligence mission statement I've used for several years (repeat from previous post but will add more detail).  “Define ourselves based on problems we solve and value we provide, not your competition. But also equip ourselves to stand out from competition and win against them.”Sales: Equip teams with knowledge and tools to win against the competition.Product: Equip teams insight into competitive product sets so we can build better, differentiated product. Marketing: Dee ...Read More

PMM can bring the perspective from beyond the user. What are the markets, influencers, our executives, analysts, and competitors saying. If PMM is the subject matter expert – if they have a mind map for all the places where knowledge lives inside and outside the organization, then PMM again is the hub enabling a team of researchers.  An example I recently had was for a maturity model. An internal research was tasked to create a maturity model for our customers. I knew of several other maturity m ...Read More

Used on its own, market research is a reasonable tool for getting gaining and sharing knowledge on customers, markets, and competitors. What market research won't do is tell you if you have the right solution. For that, you need to run experiments to test if there's a good fit between the problem and solution. Experiments provide you with the data you need to shape the solution. Here is what the best teams do: - Capture granular behavioral data that describes the complex relationship spanning th ...Read More

I feel your pain!  - Templates - Prioritize with execs what will drive impact + Set expectations internal - Google alerts One other thing to think about...How can you use market research for multiple purposes...so much internal content that gets created can be tweaked and shifted by 20% to become external content that feeds into demand gen efforts or can help influence influencers. It also becomes internal enablement – helps onboard employees, ramp sales, train GTM teams for launches. That can h ...Read More

It's about grounding the organization in an understanding of the market opportunity, ecosystem, mindset, external factors impacting potential buyers. There's so many flavors with different goals...Market Sizing (whats the market attractiveness), Pricing research (how do we maximize business value), Buyer research (how can we connect to buyer behaviors and motives), etc. But there are also always on programs – Voice of Customer programs feed into personas, product strategy. Competitive intelligen ...Read More

What I love about product design teams is how differently they think and create. They tend to be really amazing at information design. PMM can create strong foundations – let's say user personas – and UX researchers and designers might totally reimagine how to display personas relative to their own projects. That can open up a new world of thinking for PMM – and more practically become an asset used by PMM for a variety of work (onboarding new hires, design new creative takes on messaging, chann ...Read More